Thursday, 16 June 2016

I'm (attempting) to write a novel!

This is quite a daunting post to it publish, but here we go. About a month ago I woke up from a dream and couldn't shake off the feeling that the dream was real. I got thinking about it, and suddenly in my mind I'd come up with a dystopian world and a skeleton of a novel. And that's where my idea for my own novel came from.

Now I'm no professional writer or anything but I have said for the past two years or so how I'd love to write a book, but now I've finally decided the time is now. I don't know if it's very good- it probably isn't - but this summer I'm focusing on building the world and the characters in depth, and plan to just write - not caring how bad or how good it is, but just get the words onto paper and see where it takes me. And I thought, why not keep my blog up to date on where my novel is going and how the process is for me? So here we go, here is my first instalment of 'Writing with Christina' - I'll probably update it once every two or three weeks this summer (kind of inspired by this series of videos by Christine Riccio.)
I'm going to be very vague about the actual characters/ plot of this book, so this series may not be interesting, but you never know!

World building and character profiles

My inspiration for my book came from my dream. In my head I had the main two characters and where they were going, but I needed to create the world. This came fairly easy, I started taking messy scribbly notes about the plot, once I'd got the idea of having three main characters - two females and one male, I started figuring out the world. It is a type of dystopian book, which obviously means a complicated world accompanies it, this was so fun to create and imagine. I tried to put a little spin on it, and at the moment as a base to my novel, it works well (in my opinion.)

From here I started writing, I started with an epilogue which flew out of me so quickly and got me very excited to write. However then about 2,000 words in I hit a wall, I wasn't too sure of my characters and their personality. I realised I needed to differentiate between them and make each individual different. So I set out to make character profiles. I've found it hard, with two main female characters, to differ between the two. Now I've finished the narrator's character profile and can see a precise difference between the two. Whilst creating this world/characters I have started an inspiration board on Pinterest. Cassandra Clare (author of the Mortal Instruments and the Shadowhunter world) often does this for her books and I can really see how it helps. It helps vision characters and settings. Here's a link to my pinterest board - you can see the names and overall themes of the novel if you fancy.
I've got three main characters, and having been questioning whether to write the novel from three different point of view's which is something I'm going to decide next week, once I've got all three of their character profiles done.

This is quite scary to shout to the world that I'm writing a novel. There is a slim chance anyone will ever read it (apart from maybe my family) but I wanted, for my blog and for myself, to create a document of my journey, struggles and positives of this huge task! Hope you've had a good week, Christina x

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I've had this blog for seven years now, it's seen me go through every phase in my teenage life, but right now I'm just writing about what I want to write, and if anyone cares to read, well, that would just be lovely!